There are some poets you travel the routes of
so often you could feel your way in the dark,
that turn, that corner, and then the plummet
towards the end. What does it give you, after all,
to meet in person in a room? A thought
the dog doesn’t share, when, having known
the followed route, the stored scent,
an affair of the air, here is
the other dog! Incarnate! Guessed and host!
‘Poets know words, know routes, know ghosts’

Uneasy nights out with dead Russian poets, dalliances with German gasfitters and emotionally fraught games of badminton are brought together for the first time, along with a brand new body of work, in this time-spanning selection of Anna Jackson’s poetry. Local gothic, suburban pastoral and answerings-back to literary icons are all enhanced by Jackson’s light hand and sly humour.

Pastoral yet gritty, intellectual and witty, sweet but with stings in their tails, the poems and sequences collected in Pasture and Flock are essential reading for both long-term and new admirers of Jackson’s slanted approach to lyric poetry.